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A post about car gadgetry rather than kitchen gadgetry? As some of you know, car technology has played a huge part in my life in the last year. I am driving again. Me, the girl with a fear of driving (I don’t know why I don’t quite like to call it a driving phobia).

I heard my husband tell someone the other day that I was a “nervous driver”. It made me giggle as I really don’t consider myself a nervous driver, I have a fear of driving. Two very different things, in my case (or in my mind). But I may adopt the “nervous driver” description as, if I start saying I am a nervous driver I may not feel I have to explain much else. Whereas with fear of driving I feel like I have to justify where that fear comes from, why I have a fear of driving, which leads to a very long explanation.

I have had a fear of driving for over 20 years. When you have chronic pain directly related to how you acquired that fear of driving, it’s very difficult to shake it off. I hadn’t blogged about my fear of driving for a while, I have in the past though and you can find previous posts and the explanation of the reason why here.

Fear of driving is very common. It is estimated that millions of drivers suffer from driving anxiety. For some of us it’s quite strong and we can easily put off driving for months, years, decades but I have to admit, after what has been my longest driving spell in a couple of decades, I can tell you this: modern cars can bring a lot of peace of mind if your fear of driving brings a lot of anxiety to the driver’s seat. From worrying about not being able to find the right controls to fretting about taking one hands off the wheel in the first place.

If you’re reading this, chances are that you too have a fear of driving or are an anxious driver so you probably know already how exhausting it can be to drive despite that. The levels of anxiety spiral out of control. This post about car technology is just one half of my get-back-to-driving- journey in 2016. As you can imagine, the other half is way harder to write about and so I will do that in a different post when I’m ready.

In the meantime, please feel free to share any experiences, achievements and failures of your own. You are not alone. There are a lot of us out there who totally understand what you’re going through. And that word “failure” is just another step on our road, failure is only negative if we let it be. From failure comes determination to succeed and so it’s just a little bump on our road to success, driving success in this case.